This week’s 10 most read channel and MSP news stories, columns, blogs, editorials and research involved:
10. UCaaS Acquisition - Big Valuation: Sangoma's purchase of Star2Star for a lofty 30 times adjusted EBITDA reinforces the ongoing M&A trend in the Unified Communications as a Service Provider market.
9. Thoma Bravo Advantage SPAC Completes IPO: The SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) is designed to acquire a software company… Thoma Bravo already owns stakes in MSP-friendly software companies such as Barracuda, ConnectWise, SolarWinds and Sophos, among many others.
8. Workday Acquires Employee Experience Software: The $700 million deal that tucks Peakon ApS into Workday reinforces growing interest in so-called employee experience software. A few days after the deal, Microsoft announced its own experience software called Microsoft Viva.
7. Accenture Buys Cloud Software Engineering Firm Imaginea: The global IT consulting firm continues to expand its Accenture Cloud First group to focus on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure application modernization projects. Accenture has now made 55 acquisitions since 2019.
6. Massive Government IT Consulting Buyout: Indeed, Peraton, backed by private equity firm Veritas Capital, acquired government IT consulting firm Perspecta for $7.1 billion.
5. Technology Company M&A List for 2021: We’ve covered more than 95 merger and acquisition (M&A) deals so far in 2021. Most involve MSPs, technology companies, and private equity firms. Also, we tracked 538 M&A deals in 2020. Check out the complete lists.
4. Amazon CEO Transition Details: When and why the CEO crown will shift from founder Jeff Bezos to AWS leader Andy Jassy.
3. SolarWinds Orion Breach Timeline: New details about how hackers may have leveraged SolarWinds' Microsoft Office 365 accounts, according to SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna.
2. ConnectWise Acquires Service Leadership: ConnectWise gains technology consulting firm that assists MSPs & technology solutions providers (TSPs) with business development, performance benchmarking and more.
1. SBA PPP Loan – Round Two Hiccups: The latest round of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans — organized by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) — is moving along but there are also some glitches, as documented by ChannelE2E.
